and adventure, but the hunger-need, has urged him on his vast
adventures. Whether a bankrupt gentleman sailing to colonise
Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour on the sugar
plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie, it is a
desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eat than
he can get at home.
It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human
anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-
bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores
to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These
migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the
word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the
pain of hunger, man has literally drifted his way around the
planet. There have been drifts in the past, innumerable and
forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, or
composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made no
scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show that
they had been.
These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just
as we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended
from some kin of the quadrumana through having developed “a pair
of great toes out of two opposable thumbs.” Dominated by fear,
and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early
ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we
experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating
and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year-long odysseys of
screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in
glacial gravels, some of them, and their bone-scratchings in cave-
men’s lairs.
There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from
north to south and back again, drifts that have criss-crossed one
another, and drifts colliding and recoiling and caroming off in
A Collection of Stories
4
new directions. From Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into
Asia, and from Central Asia the Turanians have drifted across
Europe. Asia has thrown forth great waves of hungry humans from
the prehistoric “round-barrow” “broad-heads” who overran Europe
and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down through the hordes
of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present immigration of Chinese and
Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians and the Greeks,
with unremembered drifts behind them, colonised the Mediterranean.
Rome was engulfed in the torrent of Germanic tribes drifting down
from the north before a flood of drifting Asiatics. The Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes, after having drifted whence no man knows,
poured into Britain, and the English have carried this drift on
around the world. Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and
voracious, the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar
regions, the Pigmy to the fever-rotten jungles of Africa. And in
this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be of
Chinese into the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans
to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-lands of
Manitoba and the Northwest.
Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind,
fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless
the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift
of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan
drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra. Only
the monuments of these Aryans remain. They themselves have
perished utterly, though not until after leaving evidences of
their drift clear across the great South Pacific to far Easter
Island. And on that drift they encountered races who had
accomplished the drift before them, and they, the Aryans, passed,
in turn, before the drift of other and subsequent races whom we
to-day call the Polynesian and the Melanesian.
Man early discovered death. As soon as his evolution permitted,
he made himself better devices for killing than the old natural
ones of fang and claw. He devoted himself to the invention of
killing devices before he discovered fire or manufactured for
himself religion. And to this day, his finest creative energy and
technical skill are devoted to the same old task of making better
and ever better killing weapons. All his days, down all the past,
have been spent in killing. And from the fear-stricken, jungle-
lurking, cave-haunting creature of long ago, he won to empery over
the whole animal world because he developed into the most terrible
and awful killer of all the animals. He found himself crowded.
He killed to make room, and as he made room ever he increased and
found himself crowded, and ever he went on killing to make more
room. Like a settler clearing land of its weeds and forest bushes
in order to plant corn, so man was compelled to clear all manner
of life away in order to plant himself. And, sword in hand, he
has literally hewn his way through the vast masses of life that
occupied the earth space he coveted for himself. And ever he has
carried the battle wider and wider, until to-day not only is he a
far more capable killer of men and animals than ever before, but
A Collection of Stories
5
he has pressed the battle home to the infinite and invisible hosts
of menacing lives in the world of micro-organisms.
It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the
sword. And yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose
by the sword than perished by it, else man would not to-day be
over-running the world in such huge swarms. Also, it must not be
forgotten that they who did not rise by the sword did not rise at
all. They were not. In view of this, there is something wrong
with Doctor Jordan’s war-theory, which is to the effect that the
best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men who are
left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore, the
human race deteriorates under war. If this be so, if we have sent
forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were
left, and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and
are what we splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid
and god-like beings must have been our forebears those ten
thousand millenniums ago! Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan’s
theory, those ancient forebears cannot live up to this fine
reputation. We know them for what they were, and before the
monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints and
resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago.
And by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the
planet, those ape-like creatures have developed even into you and
me. As Henley has said in “The Song of the Sword”:
“The Sword Singing –
Driving the darkness,
Even as the banners
And spear of the Morning;
Sifting the nations,
The Slag from the metal,
The waste and the weak
From the fit and the strong;
Fighting the brute,
The abysmal Fecundity;
Checking the gross
Multitudinous blunders,
The groping, the purblind
Excesses in service
Of the Womb universal,
The absolute drudge.”
As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield
in search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the
killing of men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell
under the sword. Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in
fat valleys and rich river deltas, were swept away by the drifts
of stronger men who were nourished on the hardships of deserts and
mountains and who were more capable with the sword. Unknown and
A Collection of Stories
6
unnumbered billions of men have been so destroyed in prehistoric
times. Draper says that in the twenty years of the Gothic war,
Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; “and that the wars,
famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the
human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000.”
Germany, in the Thirty Years’ War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants.
The record of our own American Civil War need scarcely be
recalled.
And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword.
Flood, famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in
reducing population–in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in
his “Expansion of Races,” has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes
of the Yellow River burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned. The
failure of crops in Ireland, in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths.
The famines in India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900 lessened the
population by 21,000,000. The T’ai’ping rebellion and the
Mohammedan rebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78,
destroyed scores of millions of Chinese. Europe has been swept
repeatedly by great plagues. In India, for the period of 1903 to
1907, the plague deaths averaged between one and two millions a
year. Mr. Woodruff is responsible for the assertion that
10,000,000 persons now living in the United States are doomed to
die of tuberculosis. And in this same country ten thousand